GE was a powerful company, but they got their asses kicked by GM on this one.

Crowds… and the Street Car’s answer

OUT of the multiplying perplexities of the traffic problem, one fact emerges clearly; the electric street car is our most efficient means of moving masses of people.

The street car passenger occupies six square feet of traffic space. The automobile passenger requires an average of 44 square feet. In thirty of our largest cities, street cars are now carrying over 30,000,000 passengers daily. Attempt to put them in automobiles, and the street—which cannot easily expand its curbs—would be too narrow to hold them.

THE scenarist’s dream of New York City in 1980 has been done in miniature at Hollywood for “Just Imagine,” a motion picture fantasy. This model took five months to complete and cost approximately $200,000. It was built in an old blimp hangar once used by the U. S. Army balloon corps and covers a ground area 75×225 feet, representing the most extravagant effort yet conceived by the American cinema industry.

Well, we do have flat-screen computers you can write on that fit in a briefcase, but I’m still waiting to take my 250 MPH car to a business meeting in another domed city. Perhaps by the end of the year.

40 Years in the Future

By James R. Berry

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paperâ€”which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.

COOLING big cities by means of underground air ducts has long been the dream of inventors and sweltering citizens alike. A plan is now being seriously considered by a Chicago scientist, Dr. Gustav Eglov, of the American Chemical Society.

Dr. Eglov believes that huge refrigeration plants built at intervals of a mile and a half along city streets would rid the canyons between sky scrapers of humid hot air.

Like the dinosaur, which grew too bulky for its own good, our mammoth cities are doomed to extinction, say scientific prophets. Disintegration began when Lindbergh hopped the Atlantic, foreshadowing the day of interurban planes, as told here.

by RUSSELL J. MORT

SCIENTIFIC prophets looking into the future proclaim that our mammoth cities, the likes of which the world has never seen before, are doomed to obsolescence. In time, cobwebs will enshroud the cloud-piercing Empire State building and dandelions will grow on Fifth Avenue and Wall Street, they believe, after exhaustive studies into the trend of the times.

A DEFINITE step towards the relief of traffic congestion on much travelled city thoroughfares by the construction of streets under streets is soon to be taken by the city of New York. When this stupendous project has been brought to completion the metropolis will have an underground lane for fast through traffic, a tunnel for local and express trains, all built underneath the surface street, which will be left for local traffic.

TRANSPORTATION of city inhabitants through subway or overhead tubes on endlessly moving belts, providing more speed and comfort than our present systems of passenger service, loom as a possibility, according to Norman W. Storer, engineer of the Westinghouse Electrical Co., who has developed the idea.

As described by Mr. Storer, the system is an arrangement of continuous trains or belts of cars, running on parallel tracks. There is a stationary loading platform along the entire course of the system.

This is a fun look at the city of the future. Their New York of 2000 seems fairly similar that of today, just with more blimps and less variety of food. And I can’t wait to see the giant milkquitducts “carrying great white streams into the city from the dairy regions, 200 miles away.”

Babies Born Today May See

Cities of 30,000,000, Skyscraper Sidewalks, Roof Top Airports and Food Piped As Water Is Today

By MYRON M. STEARNS

FROM the height of a great precipice two men looked down on a continuous stream of moving automobiles. Farther from the ground than the Palisades rise above the Hudson River at the highest point, they were on no natural crag. They were looking down from a window on the twentieth story of a New York hotelâ€”not a fabulous building of a hundred years henceâ€”but a matter-of-fact structure of today. Dinner was served in their room. The fish had traveled more than 6,000 miles to reach themâ€” Alaska salmon. The steak came from a steer raised near the Mexican border, shipped a thousand miles to be “finished” by a special feeding, another five hundred miles to be dressed, and still another thousand miles in refrigerator cars to reach the metropolis. Fruit from Southern California, vegetables from Georgia, olives from Italy. And the eggs in the Mayonnaise dressing for the saladâ€”no jokingâ€”were laid on the other side of the world, in China, nearly two years before. It was good Mayonnaise, too. There was a knock at the door.

It sure would screw up your property value if someone tried to build a billion ton sky-darkening airport over your house. Also I’m not quite sure why it needs to rotate…. bonus feature?

Proposes Orientable Roof-Top Airports For Cities
PROPOSED as a solution to the problem of locating an airport in the heart of any big city, a design for a long orientable runway, which would be mounted on circular tracks atop tall buildings, as sketched above, has been conceived by a French engineer.